A Holocaust Controversy: The Treblinka Affair in Postwar France

Samuel Moyn, A Holocaust Controversy: The Treblinka Affair in Postwar France (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2005).

Review by Richard J. Golsan, Texas A&M University

In A Holocaust Controversy: The Treblinka Affair in Postwar France, Samuel Moyn offers a precise and thought-provoking account of the controversy that erupted in France following the 1966 publication of Jean-François Steiner's Treblinka: The Revolt of An Extermination Camp. The controversy, which raged for several months and involved numerous renowned historians, philosophers, and politicians, as well as camp survivors and résistants, raised crucial and timely issues concerning not only the nature of Nazi crimes and the camps themselves, but also difficult and often wrenching questions concerning Jewish complicity with the Nazis and the nature of Jewish identity itself.

Moyn points out that the controversy originally erupted not with the actual publication of Steiner's book but with an interview that the writer gave to the Gaullist (and right-wing) Le Nouveau Candide in mid-March 1966. In the interview, Steiner, then a twenty-eight-year-old writer and journalist, made several provocative and indeed scandalous claims not only about his book (which, Moyn notes, resembles Truman Capote's In Cold Blood in that it is essentially a "nonfiction novel"), but also about the Treblinka death camp and the inmates' revolt, which occurred on 2 August 1943. First, Steiner insisted on the absolute distinction between Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps like Treblinka, which targeted Jews. At the time, this distinction was highly problematic in that it challenged the prevailing view of the camps summed up in David Rousset's discussions of the univers concentrationnaire. In this perspective, the distinction between concentration and extermination camps was downplayed and even obscured, and all of Hitler's victims, Jews and political prisoners alike, were lumped together and characterized as representatives of the "antifascist struggle" against Nazism. For Moyn, Steiner's insistence on the crucial distinction between the death camps and the concentration camps, as well as between Jews and other victims of l'univers concentrationnaire, "herald[ed] a shift in French post-Holocaust culture," paving the way for, among other things, the nation's focus in the 1980s and 1990s on French complicity in the Nazi genocide of the Jews.

Steiner's interview about his book proved shocking and even offensive on other scores as well. In insisting...